


Where Do We Go From Here?

by Inchoatl



Category: Star vs. The Forces Of Evil
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 07:40:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11504790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inchoatl/pseuds/Inchoatl
Summary: Marco and Jackie have a talk. Post Starcrushed.





	Where Do We Go From Here?

Occasionally having years of experience as a quietly studious wallflower had its advantages, and Marco is able to slip out of the house without anyone noticing him and hauling him in for the third degree. He catches sight of Ponyhead turning around just before he gets the front door closed, and that is a conversation he really doesn't need to have. If recrimination with an extra hefty side of oblivious narcissism can be said to be a conversation. He can already see it in his mind's eye. 7.2 on the Ponyhead scale, at least.

The night outside is still calm which seems like some sort of cosmic joke after what just happened. It's quiet though, which is a nice alternative to the suffocating crush of voices he had to wade through to get out of the house. On the flip side, it leaves Marco alone with his own thoughts, and all his thoughts want to do is rewind the last month and catalogue every hint that he'd missed every time Star had acted uncharacteristically awkward everychancehe'dhadtojusttalktoherandsorthingsoutand-

And a walk sounds nice. A nice, quiet walk through the empty streets of Echo Creek where he can have a mental breakdown in the privacy of his own mind and where he doesn't have to deal with anyone asking questions about Star. He can figure out what to do after his brain stops tying itself in knots.

It isn't until he's taken two steps down the front stairs that Marco realizes he isn't alone outside. Sitting on the stone retaining wall of the house's front garden is Jackie. She has half a keytar sitting in her lap, one that looks suspiciously similar to Oskar's, and she's tapping listlessly at the keys to no apparent avail.

Marco's nerves flatline. 

Half his brain is still gibbering on an endless loop, and the other half has gone completely numb. Sitting somewhere in the maelstrom that is his thoughts is a small voice, strangely coherent for all the background noise, telling Marco that he needs to go talk to her. He's already messed up his friendship with Star. He can't mess up his relationship with Jackie too. Not on top of everything else.

All Marco wants to do now is sleep. Just write the day off, stop thinking, stop doing, stop being, pack up everything, ship it off to tomorrow and black out. But his nerves are shot, his brain has given up being helpful as a bad habit and not ten minutes ago Star had told him that she had a crush him moments before she had run upstairs and disappeared, her room crumbling into motes of light behind her like a sandcastle washing away on the tide.

Marco walks over to Jackie, sits down next to her and says, “Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” Jackie says, and her voice is small and calm and sad, and Marco is already regretting his decision.

Jackie pokes the keytar a couple more times, and Marco tries and fails to say something because everything he has to say boils down to a hollow 'I'm sorry' before he settles on asking “Are you all right?”

A silence stretches out. The litany of 'You messed up!' in Marco's head is growing stronger by the minute, and he opens his mouth to say something, anything to counteract the downward spiral in the back of his mind.

Jackie puts her hand on Marco's knee and quietly shakes her head, and just like that he feels his panic seize up, like someone threw the brakes on his overclocked mind. Slowly, he can feel himself start to delflate, his fear draining away to leave behind a numbing sense of loss that, he realizes, he'd been running from. 

“Sorry,” Jackie says, “I'm not really good at this.”

“Good at what?” Marco asks, giving the keytar an experimental poke. It does nothing. It also gives him something to on besides Jackie's face. It's an excellent distraction. He pokes it again.

“You know. Getting hurt. Being sad,” Jackie half laughs, her voice quavering on the edge of tears.

Marco's traitorous brain takes this opportunity to stab him in the back, and he says “I broke your skateboard that one time, you handled that really well,” before he realizes what he's saying.

Jackie laughs, an actual happy laugh, and the instant of regret Marco felt evaporates like it was never there.

“That's different, you dork! That was just a skateboard. I can always get another skateboard.”

“Yeah, but-” Marco starts to say before the unsaid 'I can't get another you' hits him right in the gut and he goes silent. 

“I still think you're better at dealing with... stuff than most people,” Marco says eventually. “You're always so chill about everything. It's one of the things I've always really admired about you.”

“Yeah, life does feel a lot easier if you just go with the flow all the time,” Jackie says, flipping the keytar lengthways and bouncing it off her shoe. “It's worked pretty well for me so far. But I'm starting to think there are parts of it that aren't so great.”

“Really?” Marco asks. “Being able to shrug things off seems like a really good deal to me.”

Jackie nods. “Yeah. I think I started to realize it while watching you and Star. She's a little like you, actually,” Jackie adds, and laughs when Marco looks over at her incredulously.

“Nuh uh, I'm not seeing it,” Marco said. “She's absolutely fearless. She's always ready to charge into... anything! Sometimes without thinking... Ok, maybe a lot of the time without thinking. Me? Most of the time I just... I just worry a lot.”

Jackie shakes her head. “You both care about stuff. A lot.”

“And yeah, sometimes you get super wrapped up in stuff and you have a Marco moment,” Jackie grins and elbows Marco lightly, “and sometimes Star gets in over her head, like with that sleepover cube thing, but I think there's good sides to that too.”

Marco laughs. “Good sides to worrying a lot and getting in trouble?”

“Nah, I mean caring about stuff!” Jackie says. “You get really tied up worrying about getting stuff right, but you also never give up, no matter how difficult things get for you. And if Star thinks something's worth doing, she does it, even if it might go wrong. Like, honestly? Watching you two is kind of why I asked you to the school dance.”

Marco blinks. “What, seriously?”

“Yeah,” Jackie says, smiling at him fondly. “You both showed me that it can be tough, and it can make life more complicated, but caring about things is worth it.” 

Jackie sighs and looks out at the stars twinkling out in the cool air of the night sky.

“Being chill and going with the flow can be nice, but I feel like you kinda start to let things slip by, and after a while you look back and you start seeing this whole long line of missed opportunities.”

Marco nods. It makes sense, even if he still wishes he could just take things in stride like Jackie can. The night goes quiet again, and Marco realizes that his inner monologue hasn't started up again when he starts to pick out bits of conversation floating from the house. People are starting to wonder where he is, and it's only a matter of time before they start to look outside. Which means he's on the clock now.

Of all the things to go well today, talking with Jackie is not what he expected. Star's departure has shoved all of his other worries into the corner, and it seems to have made talking to Jackie easy, the way Marco feels it should be. Which makes what he has to say next all the more difficult, because now that his mind has calmed down, he knows what he needs to do next.

“Jackie look, I'm sorry. I gotta go after Star,” Marco says as he pulls out his dimensional scissors. “She didn't say what was wrong, but she got rid of her entire room when she left and I'm really worried-”

“Dude, calm down,” Jackie says, patting Marco once on the head. “Why are you apologizing? I'm also worried about Star. She's my friend too, you know.”

That brings Marco up short.

“I... yeah, sorry. I just... I feel like I'm ditching you. And going after Star, after what she said tonight. I feel like...”

Jackie sighs and says, “Yeah. We gotta talk about that. But,” she adds holding up her hand before Marco can get a word in edgewise, “not yet.”

“Why not?” Marco asks, nonplussed.

“Well, Star's not here, right?” Jackie says. “This is about all three of us. We can't have this talk if she's not here.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess you're right.”

Marco goes to stand up before pausing and sitting back down. He looks at his scissors and thinks about what Jackie told him about caring. About never giving up. About taking chances. About being sad and hurting when things go wrong. About lost opportunities.

About caring being worth it.

“Actually, hey, you know what?” Marco says as he gives the scissors an experimental snip before slicing a hole into the air. “How does a summer spent dimension hopping sound?”

Jackie looks between Marco and the hole in space floating in front of her and says, “You know, that sounds cool. I think I'd like that. Let's do it.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading. If you see any errors, please point them out to me and I'll do my best to fix them.


End file.
